There are a lot of comments in the thread claiming that there’s some kind of “smooth talker” senior engineer candidate, but frankly that is preposterous and I s

There are a lot of comments in the thread claiming that there’s some kind of “smooth talker” senior engineer candidate, but frankly that is preposterous and I simply don’t believe all the impossibly perfect anecdata thrown around. It is incredibly hard to talk clearly about complex projects you’ve solved before in the specific tradeoff circumstances of some past project or job. Someone who can do that with great clarity is extremely hard to find and valuable. I saw one comment that said something along the lines of hearing a candidate talk fluently about tech details (at a very specific implementation level) of past work, but then put them in front of a keyboard and they go “hmm urr uhh” or whatever. This is frustratingly dumb. First of all, senior engineers should spend way, way more of their time thinking and directing architecture choices or prioritization than writing code, _especially_ in early stage projects or companies. Second, I’m absolutely certain that the coding question you’re asking to generate this himming and hawing is some Cracking the Coding Interview bullshit trivia question that this senior engineer hasn’t thought about in 20 years since their algorithms class in college because they were too busy actually solving real business problems for people (including a few rare problems that involved detailed deep dives into novel or complex algorithmic solutions). We harass and haze people with bullshit trivia, then turn around and don’t even ask them what problems they have really, actually solved before, or invent reasons to rationalize that if they solved a lot of problems before, they’re just some sort of smooth talker and somehow the only proof is if they memorized Floyd’s cycle detection algorithm or some other ludicrous bullshit. What a deeply humanity-hostile industry it is!